This was probably my favorite panel of the day, Brooke Wentz was a great moderator and it felt more relevant to have actual artists on the panel. My gems:

You’ve heard it before and they said it again – there is now more money in music placement than in actually selling CDS. Record labels that actually still exist today spend a lot more time on “special markets” (aka anything that makes money and is not just straight up selling CDs).

Mat Kearney illustrated it best when he said something like (rough quote) “you need to sell like two million records to recoup” but with placement you actually get that money in your pocket. He acknowledged that he really got put on the map when his song was placed in a key scene on the then wildly popular Grey’s Anatomy. He became “the cool thing to license” for a minute.

In the past, film and TV would pay to have music scored to their projects, but now it is much cheaper to just license tracks.

At one point companies would pay “a lot” of money to license tracks, but today the market is literally flooded so rates have gone down considerably.

Lyrics are important to TV shows and films. There are artists today who don’t gig much and instead write songs specifically to try to get them placed. They use universal terms like “breath” and their songs don’t mention specific names or places, they work in increments of :30-:60 seconds. There is an entire art around crafting these “non-songs”.

There are more and more product companies looking for artists to brand their products.

All the professionals on the panel admitted that they NEVER use placement firms like TAXI when searching for new music. Instead they rely on personal contacts, trusted sources (blogs, friends, etc.), and… TWITTER! Yes, you can find music placement opps on Twitter – just follow all the music supervisors. One company that did get a favorable review was Jingle Punks.

Everyone did mention how much they like placing indie artists whose music they believe in (it is always more fun to give money to a deserving starving artist). So technically indie artists without major representation can get placed, but you need to:

Be out there playing music and connecting w/people so that you get on the radar of cool people who do things like place music in films. Connecting with people also means going to conferences like SF MusicTech, MIDEM, SXSW, etc.

Fan funding is all the rage these days and we’ve noticed a few Santa Cruz bands getting in on the action. Check out these local Kickstarter pages if you’d like to see how a few of our local acts are taking their projects straight to the fans.

audiafauna’s goal is to raise $8000 by February 1 in order to begin their recording early next year. As of this blog post, they already had 58 backers and at $4863 raised, they are well on their way to reaching their goal.

In early 2011 Shane hopes to record his debut album. His goal is to raise $17,000 to sustain himself and his family while also funding his actual recording expenses. As of this blog post, with only 5 backers and $745 raised, he has a ways to go to meet his goal in the next 21 days.

Fan-funding (or crowdfunding) is the simple concept of empowering the fans to raise money for you- to FUND your project. Typically this is done through an incentive system, in which the artist will set a monetary goal, and has a set amount of time to reach said goal. There are then different levels of rewards that vary based on the amount a fan contributes towards the project.